In the vaulted halls of the Bienal Pavilion in São Paulo, where global names and polished narratives have long dominated the curatorial gaze, a different kind of artist is being honored this year—one who never sought permission to speak, and yet was seldom heard. Maria Auxiliadora da Silva, the self-taught, Afro-Brazilian painter who died in 1974 at the age of 39, returns not only through her paintings but also through the yellowed clippings, faded pamphlets, and personal documents carefully preserved in the Bienal Archive.

Auxiliadora painted not from theory, but from life. She was born in Campo Belo, Minas Gerais, in 1935, but it was in São Paulo's peripheries—its working-class neighborhoods and spiritual centers—that she developed her sensibility. Her canvases are not mere representations; they are embodiments of community, resistance, and faith. With thick applications of paint, often layered with strands of her own hair, Auxiliadora built images that refused flatness—both literally and politically.

A Vocabulary of Joy and Struggle

Her paintings pulse with color and movement: women braiding each other's hair, Umbanda ceremonies lit by candles, samba dancers mid-spin. In her universe, the everyday is exalted, and the spiritual is always close. She painted what she saw, and more importantly, how she felt it.

But joy in Auxiliadora's work was never naïve. Her scenes often portray illness, poverty, death—yet without sentimentality. Instead, they are imbued with a raw clarity that exposes the inequities of Brazilian society while affirming the dignity of those who live on its margins. She painted from within, not about. Hers is not an anthropological gaze; it is a communion.

In an art world still grappling with its exclusionary legacy, Auxiliadora's work resisted easy categorization. Too decorative for high modernism, too Afro-Brazilian for Eurocentric critics, and too female for the patriarchal lens, she was often relegated to labels like "naïve" or "primitive"—terms that function less as descriptions than as mechanisms of dismissal, ways of cordoning off work that challenges established hierarchies. The Bienal's decision to place her at the center of its 2025 edition marks a shift—not just in who gets remembered, but how institutional power acknowledges its own blind spots.

The Archive as Site of Resistance

This year's Bienal does more than show her art—it reveals her life as part of the artistic statement itself. In the Bienal Archive, visitors will find not only images but histories: handwritten notes, newspaper reviews, exhibition flyers, and personal correspondence. Among these documents is a letter from 1969, written in Auxiliadora's careful script, declining an invitation to exhibit because she lacked funds for proper framing—a reminder of how material conditions shaped which voices entered the conversation.

These documents are not ancillary; they are part of the artwork. They tell a story of a woman who insisted on making art despite systemic invisibility. A Black, working-class woman with no formal training, Auxiliadora created from a place the art world had long ignored—and in doing so, forced it to expand. The act of archiving, in this case, becomes political. It resists the kind of forgetting that has buried so many Black and Indigenous Brazilian artists while reframing the Bienal itself—not as an elite platform but as a space for historical repair.

In a cultural moment where institutions worldwide are examining their colonial foundations, São Paulo's gesture feels deeply rooted in Brazil's own unfinished conversations around race, gender, and class. Auxiliadora's inclusion is not simply symbolic; it is structural. As conservative forces and cultural censorship again threaten Brazil's democratic spaces, reclaiming artists like Auxiliadora becomes urgent. Her paintings are not just aesthetic objects—they are testimonies. They speak of a Brazil that exists outside gated communities and luxury galleries: a Brazil of terreiro and favela, of illness and healing, of silence and song.

The Center Reimagined

Maria Auxiliadora once wrote, "My art is my life." In a country where so many lives are systemically erased, to make art from life is a radical gesture. Now, in the halls of the Bienal, that gesture reverberates across generations. Visitors will come for the color, stay for the power, and perhaps leave with a new map—one that traces not the margins, but the center as it could be.

This is not a tribute, but a return—and in that return, a recognition that the canon was never complete without her.